An adaptive memetic framework for multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems: studies on software next release and travelling salesman problems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose two multi-objective memetic algorithms (MOMAs) using two different adaptive mechanisms to address combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). One mechanism adaptively selects solutions for local search based on the solutions' convergence toward the Pareto front. The second adaptive mechanism uses the convergence and diversity information of an external set (dominance archive), to guide the selection of promising solutions for local search. In addition, simulated annealing is integrated in this framework as the local refinement process. The multi-objective memetic algorithms with the two adaptive schemes (called uMOMA-SA and aMOMA-SA) are tested on two COPs and compared with some well-known multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. Experimental results suggest that uMOMA-SA and aMOMA-SA outperform the other algorithms with which they are compared. The effects of the two adaptive mechanisms are also investigated in the paper. In addition, uMOMA-SA and aMOMA-SA are compared with three single-objective and three multi-objective optimization approaches on software next release problems using real instances mined from bug repositories (Xuan et al. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 38(5):1195---1212, 2012). The results show that these multi-objective optimization approaches perform better than these single-objective ones, in general, and that aMOMA-SA has the best performance among all the approaches compared.